Preset Annuity Appointments: A Buyer's Guide for Agents

Search for preset annuity appointments and you'll find job ads, vendor landing pages and agent forum threads warning you off, but very little that explains what you'd actually be buying. The short answer: a preset annuity appointment is a meeting someone else books on your calendar with a retirement prospect. Whether it's worth the money depends on everything that happens before the meeting starts — where the prospect came from, what they agreed to, what was checked and who confirmed it — and on how you're billed for it. This guide walks through each of those, with the questions that separate a real appointment from a calendar entry.

What Is a Preset Annuity Appointment?

A preset (or pre-set) appointment sits one step past a lead: instead of a name to call, you get a time on your calendar. The vendor finds the prospect, reaches them, checks basic fit and books the meeting. Your work starts with the meeting itself — and with preparing for it the way top closers do.

Preset appointments for insurance agents exist in most lines, from Medicare to life and IUL, but annuity presets are where the screening matters most: the conversation only goes somewhere if the prospect has money to reposition and a reason to do it. Whatever the line, every preset comes down to four things:

• Source. Where the interest came from: an ad and a landing page, a workplace benefits program, a seminar list, an old database.
• Setter. Who booked it, and with what words: an in-house setter, an outsourced call center, a self-serve calendar link.
• Screen. What was checked before the booking: age, investable assets, timeline — or nothing at all.
• Format. Where it happens: at the kitchen table, on the phone or on Zoom.

You'll also see "preset appointments" in recruiting ads, where an agency offers a calendar of presets as a reason to join. The same four checks apply there, plus one more: who pays for them.

Preset Appointments vs. Annuity Leads vs. Live Transfers

"Annuity leads" and "preset appointments" turn up in the same searches because vendors sell the same kind of prospect at different stages of the work. The real difference is how much of that work you're buying:

• Aged leads. Older inquiries resold at a discount, usually after other agents have already worked them. Cheap, and you're rarely the first to call.
• Annuity leads. A name, a phone number and some level of interest. You contact, qualify, book and confirm. Exclusive annuity leads go to you alone; shared leads go to several agents at once.
• Live transfers. A prospect handed to you by phone in real time, usually after a quick screen by the vendor's call center. Fast, but you present cold, with no time to prepare.
• Preset appointments. A meeting booked at a set time. The vendor did the contacting, the screening and the booking.
• Showed appointments. Presets billed per appointment that shows instead of per booking: the pay-per-show model, covered below.

Moving down the list, you generally pay more per unit and spend less of your own time. The right rung depends on what you're shorter of: budget or time.

Two Products, One Name: Why Preset Prices Vary So Much

Most of the confusion comes from two different products sharing the "preset" label:

• Worksite and public-employee presets. Built around where people work: a benefits review for teachers, public employees or union members, set up through an employer or membership channel. They're priced for volume and often held by phone or at the workplace, and the screen is where the prospect works rather than what they've saved. The person across from you may be decades from retirement.
• Retirement-education presets. Built around a retirement question. The prospect responds to retirement-income education, answers qualifying questions about age and investable assets, and agrees to a meeting about their own retirement money. That costs more to produce: advertising that reaches people with assets, a screen that filters many of them out, setters who call and confirm, and exclusivity.

Both can be legitimate products; they're built for different practices. A worksite preset can suit an agent building a broad book of life and smaller retirement cases. An annuity practice that runs on rollover-sized cases needs the second kind and should expect to pay for it. Typical prices for leads, booked appointments and showed appointments are broken down in what annuity appointments cost in 2026.

Phone, In-Home or Zoom? Where Preset Annuity Appointments Happen

Where the meeting happens shapes its value more than most buyers expect:

• In-home. The traditional annuity sit. Strong rapport, but every meeting carries drive time, which limits how many you can hold in a day and how far your market reaches.
• Phone. Easy to book and easy to skip. It's hard to walk a prospect through an illustration they can't see, and harder to tell how it's landing.
• Zoom. Face to face without the drive. You can share your screen, a spouse can join from the next chair or another city, and the meeting can be documented: with consent, a notetaker records it and summarizes what was said.

That last point matters more than it sounds. When virtual annuity appointments are recorded and transcribed, "did it happen?" and "was this the prospect I was promised?" have answers on the record instead of in two people's memories — which is exactly what a fair billing dispute needs. The practical side, from licensing in the client's state to e-signatures, is in how to sell annuities over Zoom.

Booked vs. Showed: How Preset Appointments Are Billed

Preset programs usually bill in one of three ways, and the model tells you who carries the risk:

• Per booked appointment. You pay when the slot is set. The unit price is lower, and the attendance risk is yours.
• Per showed appointment. You're billed per appointment that shows rather than per booking. The vendor carries more of the attendance risk, which raises the unit price and gives the vendor every reason to confirm properly.
• Retainer. A monthly fee for effort, whatever that effort produces.

Whichever model you choose, read how the agreement defines a show, and what it expects from you, before you sign. Serious per-show programs tie that definition to evidence such as meeting recordings, call logs and calendar records, and put both sides of the process in writing. If a vendor can't point you to the definition, the price on the page isn't the real price.

Red Flags Agents Report — and What to Ask Before You Buy

Forum threads about presets tend to repeat the same few complaints:

• The prospect didn't know what the meeting was. They agreed to something else — a gift card, a sweepstakes entry, a benefits update — but not to a meeting with an agent about their money.
• Recycled names. The "fresh" preset turns out to be an old inquiry that other agents have already worked.
• Nobody confirmed it. The slot was booked days ago, and no one has spoken to the prospect since.
• Nowhere near the filters. Age, assets or interest far from what was promised, because nothing was really checked before the booking.
• Slow to deliver. The package is paid for, and the appointments trickle in weeks later.

A preset is only as good as the sentence the setter used to book it.

Before you buy from anyone, get these answers in writing:

• What did the prospect see and agree to before booking? Ask to see the landing page, the qualifying questions and what the setter tells them.
• Who sets and confirms the meeting, and how often is the prospect contacted before the slot?
• Is each prospect exclusive to me, and will prospects I don't close be resold later?
• Is the meeting recorded or documented, and can I see the record?
• How soon does the first appointment land after I pay?
• Am I billed per lead, per booking or per show, and where is a show defined?
• Will I see the prospect's answers and the setter's notes before the meeting?

For the qualification side of the audit — the asset question, the age band and the problem the prospect actually has — use the five filters that make an annuity appointment qualified.

How Our Pay-Per-Show Preset Appointments Work

Our Pay-Per-Show program is built to answer those questions before you ask them. Here's how an appointment comes together:

• Education first. Prospects come through our retirement-planning education brands, not random giveaways, aged data or resold lists.
• A qualification quiz. Prospects tell our retirement quiz their age and investable assets, and anyone who reports under $250,000 is screened out before booking. The prospects who show report an average of $1M+.
• Setter qualification. Our setters call new quiz leads within minutes to talk through their goals, timeline, savings and who makes the decision, and book the ones who fit.
• A confirmed Zoom meeting on your calendar. Every booking gets a confirmation call, and the prospect gets the Zoom link and reminders from us. In your Agent Portal you see their quiz answers and our setters' notes before the meeting, and you join from the meeting's page.
• Documented by AI. Our AI notetaker joins every meeting. After each shown meeting, your portal has its AI meeting report — summary, objections, agreed next steps and the full transcript — plus a follow-up email draft and personal AI coaching on the patterns across your meetings.

The terms are just as plain: $1,000 per showed appointment, 5 to start, and every appointment exclusive to your agency, never shared or resold. No retainers, and no ad spend on your side. Once onboarding is done and your calendar is connected, the average wait for your first booked appointment is 3 days. Onboarding and support run through your dedicated Slack channel, what counts as a show is defined in writing in the agreement, and every show is itemized on a ledger in your Agent Portal.

The Bottom Line

Preset annuity appointments aren't good or bad as a category. They're different products sold under one name, and the difference lives in the details a sales page tends to skip: where the prospect came from, what they agreed to, who confirmed it and what exactly you're billed for. Ask every vendor for those answers in writing, us included. If you want presets screened on investable assets, backed by setters who qualify new leads and confirm bookings by phone, and held on Zoom with an AI report afterward, see how our pay-per-show annuity appointments work — then hold us to the questions above.